Public Art: The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities
Symposion Urbanum Nürnberg

How Can a City Remember Properly?

What would a public culture of remembrance look like when taking recent history into account, for example, the fact that the relatives and friends of the victims of the NSU murders or the racially motivated rampages in Halle and Hanau still have to fight for more appropriate recognition? How does this aspect of recent memory relate to the examination of National Socialism’s crimes against humanity and their traces in urban space? And both, in turn, to confronting the crimes committed under German colonial rule? These pressing questions are explored in the conference reader Public Art: The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities.

The contributions to the book were developed in the context of the titular international conference which took place in connection to the multi-part project Symposion Urbanum Nürnberg (see also the exhibition catalog In Situ, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, by DISTANZ). Based on text contributions by the speakers Ulf Aminde, İbrahim Arslan, Talya Feldman, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Jörg Heiser, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Olu Oguibe, Monique Roelofs, and Stephan Trüby among others the conference proceedings discuss structural racism, new tendencies toward communalization through common property and commons, the tension between restoration and new construction, and the role of art in public space.